The First Love Cookie Club (22 page)

She had to end this relationship before it got out of hand. Raylene liked Sarah. She liked her a lot. But she wasn’t right for Travis and most of all, she wasn’t the mother for Jazzy.

Driven by an impulse she could not quash, even though a part of her was screaming,
Butt out and leave your nephew alone,
Raylene dialed directory assistance. She had a very important call to make. She could only pray that she wasn’t too late.

A minute later, armed with a Nashville phone number, Raylene made the call.

“Hello?” a woman said. Raylene could hear country-and-western music twanging in the background.

“Crystal? Crystal Hunt?”

“Yeah? Who’s this?”

“This is Raylene Pringle, Travis Walker’s aunt.”

“I know who you are. What do you want?” Crystal sounded truculent and Raylene wanted to just hang up the phone and let it go, but she simply couldn’t. This was her way of making amends for her own sins.

Then she blew out a hard breath and for the first time in thirty-six years, she confessed the awful thing she’d done.

The following evening, promptly at six
p.m.
on the Sunday before Christmas, Mayor Moe gave the word for the official decorating of the Twilight Christmas tree to commence. The crowd that had gathered on the courthouse lawn surged forward enthusiastically, armed with plastic ornaments and gaudy garlands, silver tinsel and shiny ribbons, colored bows and peppermint candy canes.

Sarah looked up at the tree they’d chopped down together. The beautiful Christmas cedar that the entire town was decorating. The lights twinkled with breathtaking beauty. Snow flurries danced in the air. Carolers broke into a chorus of “Let It Snow.” She was holding hands with Travis on her left, Jazzy on her right. It was an incredible moment, totally sublime. When she was an old lady in her rocking chair looking back over her life, she’d dredge up this perfect memory of a time when she was completely happy.

Travis reached over to run his hand through her hair. The familiarity of the gesture lifted her heart. He touched her like they were officially a couple. “I still can’t believe you went and cut your hair.”

After they’d gotten back from being iced in at the hunter’s cabin the previous afternoon, Sarah had marched right into the nearest hair salon and told them to whack off her waist-length locks to her shoulders. Rapunzel had been hiding in her ivory tower too long. She’d changed, and a change of hairstyle seemed to go with the new Sarah.

She tilted her chin, raised a hand to her head. “It was weighing me down. Holding me back.”

“I like it … You look … freer, lighter.” He fluffed it. “It’s still long enough to be sexy, but not

so long that it gets tangled up in everything.” The spark in his eyes left “everything” open to interpretation.

“Ah, so I looked restrained before.”

“A bit,” he said. “Controlled. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just … this is different. You look different.”

“That’s what I was going for.”

“It’s working.” He winked.

“I think it’s pretty,” Jazzy declared.

“Thank you.” Sarah smiled.

“Sarah,” Jazzy said, reaching up to take Sarah’s palm. “Now that you’re back, can we bake kismet cookies on Christmas Eve?”

“You better ask your father about that.”

“Daddy, can we? Please, please, please?”

Travis looked at Sarah, sent her a do-you-really-want-to-do-this expression.

She nodded. “I’d love to pass along Gram’s tradition.”

“Great!” Jazzy beamed. “Christmas Eve, our house, don’t be late. Now I gotta go get me some tinsel before it’s all gone.”

Sarah and Travis laughed as Jazzy raced over to the booths where volunteers were passing out decorations.

“I’d forgotten what this was like,” Sarah said. “Such a jovial madhouse.”

He had his arms crossed over his chest, and a proud smile hung on his face. He wore a red and green striped sweater and starched blue jeans with a sharp crease running down the legs. Jazzy had already joined the crowd with a fistful of candy canes to hang on the tree. The sound system set up for the

Dickens event was still in place and the strains of the Burl Ives’s version of “Holly Jolly Christmas” filled the square. The air smelled of mulled wassail and simmering cinnamon and crisp pine. The temperature hovered around forty-five, challenging anyone to guess which direction it was headed next.

“What?” He turned to meet her gaze.

“This town at Christmas. It’s surreal. I feel like I’m trapped in
It’s a Wonderful Life.
”

His steady gray eyes held her gaze. “But it is a wonderful life, Sarah. We should celebrate every chance we get.”

The optimism on his face was touching. He actually believed it was true. Even after everything he’d been through. Maybe it was
because
of everything he’d been through. How did a person develop such a hopeful attitude toward life?

He rested his hand across her shoulder and drew her closer to him. “You’re just afraid to believe,” he said, eerily reading her mind.

That was true. She’d believed once so deeply in the power of the kismet cookies and she’d been hurt just as deeply by reality. She couldn’t get her innocence back no matter how hard she might try.

“Are you trying to tell me that there
is
such a thing as happily-ever-after?”

His eyes were enigmatic, his expression mild. “You’re the writer. You tell me.”

“It’s just fiction, a fairy tale.”

He chucked her under the chin. “Then why do you write it?”

“Because I keep hoping—“

“There you go. Right there. Hold on to that hope. You’ve gotta have hope.”

“You’re not going to burst into an encouraging song are you?”

“If it would help.” He grinned. “Listen, Sarah, I’m not always so optimistic. Not long before you came to Twilight, things were so dire with Jazzy, I feared she wouldn’t make it to her ninth birthday. But look at her now …” He waved to his daughter, who was running around hanging candy canes on the Christmas tree, a huge smile on her sweet face. “See that right there? Hope.”

Hope. Such a lovely word. Why did it feel so out of reach?

“Here’s some tinsel,” Travis said, passing her a handful of shiny silver strands. “Let’s get in there with everyone else and enjoy our wonderful life.”

Travis watched Sarah delicately drape a strand of tinsel over a branch of the Twilight Christmas tree.

You could tell a lot about people by the way they put tinsel on a tree, Travis decided. There were the chunkers, eager and impatient, who didn’t sweat the small stuff. They lived for the experience and simply lobbed the tinsel and let it fall where it may. Jazzy was a chunker. She liked to watch the tinsel slither down the needles and she laughed whenever it stuck in a clump.

Then you had minimalists who were stingy with the tinsel or eschewed it altogether as simply too much tree bling. His father had been like that. He’d wanted plain white lights, a few ornaments, and that was it. No garlands, no cranberries and popcorn strung together on a strand, no candy canes. In fact, after Travis’s mother died, he’d refused to put up a tree at all. Maybe that’s why Travisloved decorating Christmas trees. He’d been shortchanged.

And then there were the artists who positioned each strand just so, stepping back to assess their handiwork, moving forward again to futz until it was perfect. Sarah was a futzer.

Which, considering that this was a group decorating project, was an exercise in futility. No way was the tree going to come out perfect.

The way she tilted her head and studied the tree without recognizing that probably some rough-and-tumble kid was going to horse around and knock it off just as soon as she carefully finished threading the boughs with tinsel, made her seem incredibly vulnerable.

Deep within his chest, Travis felt a tugging, a sudden sadness combined with a powerful urge to protect her at all costs.

In the twinkling lights from the Christmas tree her blue eyes glistened. She wore a blue coat the color of an ice floe and black woolen slacks with those high-heeled boots he couldn’t seem to break her of wearing. He had to admit she looked damn good in them. On her head was perched a jaunty white cap with a tassel over the sexy new haircut. She looked like a snow bunny, at once both naughty and innocent.

Sarah had a calmness about her that soothed him and made him feel as if everything really would be all right. But his life had been in turmoil for so long, Travis was afraid to trust the calm.

And yet, she stabilized him. She made him feel as if the sky wasn’t perpetually on the verge of falling, as if he wasn’t always waiting for the othershoe to drop. She took things in stride. She was a good listener, and when she was with him she made him feel as if he was the only person in the world. Her focus was phenomenal and her ability to detach from her emotions gave her a wisdom most people lacked.

He enjoyed seeing the positive effects he’d had on her. She’d blossomed under his attention, opening up in ways he’d hoped for, but hadn’t fully expected. Whenever he made her smile, it felt better than sunshine on a cloudy winter day. Travis wanted to tell her how attractive she was, but every time he tried, she’d brush aside his compliments as if she didn’t believe them. She still thought of herself as an ugly duckling, or a burn victim. He saw it in the aw-shucks way she blushed when he told her she was beautiful.

But it was more than that and he knew it. She couldn’t believe that he was interested in her. In her teenage mind she had built him up as some kind of romantic hero without ever really knowing who he was inside. She’d had a crush, an infatuation, and now that he was returning the feelings, she didn’t know what to do about it. Particularly since she’d stuffed those feelings away and moved past that stage of her life. Had she outgrown him?

That unsettling thought had eaten at him since their time in the cabin. She’d seen things, been places. She’d wined and dined with celebrities. She lived in one of the biggest cities in the world and she was rich and famous. He was just a country boy who loved his quiet life with aspirations no bigger than to dance with his daughter at her wedding. How could Sarah ever be happy with a man like him, in a place like this?

Sarah turned to him as if she’d sensed he was fretting about her. “You’re not decorating the tree.”

“I’m having fun just watching you and Jazzy.”

“Come on, you got me into this, you’re getting into the mix.” She grabbed his hand and tugged him over.

Her touch—as it always did—unraveled him. Hoping it didn’t show on his face, he dived right in, mimicking her tinsel-draping techniques. On one side of them, tying red bows to the branches, were Belinda Murphey; her husband, Harvey; and their five ankle biters, Kimmie, Kameron, Karmie, Kyle, and Kevin.

On their other side were Jesse Calloway and his new bride, Flynn. They were canoodling more than decorating. Jesse owned the local motorcycle shop and Flynn was going to school to become a primary school teacher. Jesse had his arm around Flynn’s waist and kept kissing her temple while she tried to clip reindeers made from candy canes and pipe cleaners onto the tree.

Travis felt jealous; he wanted to canoodle with Sarah but he’d already gotten the message that she wasn’t keen on public displays of affection and he wondered why. Maybe she didn’t want people to know they were as intimate as they were. But the entire town knew they’d been snowed in together, and even if they hadn’t made love, everyone’s mind would have been running there.

“You know,” she said, “this is the first time I’ve actually enjoyed Christmas in years.”

“You should come back every year,” he said, and then he dared to add, “Or maybe you should just stay. You are in the process of buying a cottage.”

“Can’t do that,” she said. “I have tenants.”

“Maybe you could just stay with the tenants,” he blurted, then immediately regretted it. With Sarah he’d learned you had to move slowly. This wasn’t the right time or place to suggest they move in together. He hadn’t even realized how much he’d been thinking about living with her, and now that the words were out of his mouth, they hung there like a solid thing in the air between them.

They stared at each other. He couldn’t read what was in her eyes, but an uneasy expression settled on her face. His stomach reeled. He shouldn’t have said that. He was moving too fast for her. Hell, he was moving too fast for himself. “What’s on your mind?” he ventured.

A sad smile tugged at her lips. “Whenever I’m in this town I feel like I’m holding a snow globe in my hand. Inside is this magical world I can’t reach.”

That startled him. “You may feel like you’re on the outside of a snow globe looking in, but sometimes I feel like I’m inside the insular world of that snow globe and I can’t get out. Sure, it’s warm and cozy and welcoming, but I might forever be a caterpillar stuck in his cocoon, never able to spread my wings and fly. Don’t get me wrong, I love my town and I love my daughter more than life itself, but my wings were clipped the day Crystal got pregnant. For me, with all your knowledge and sharp observations, you bring the outside in. When I’m with you, I don’t have a sense that anything is missing. You’re the piece of the puzzle that makes me whole, Sarah, and I hope I do the same thing for you.”

She didn’t answer. His sphinx.

“We can stay apart and stay on our separate sides of the snow globe. You in silence on the outside, me safe but crowded on the inside. Or we can be together and have both worlds.”

Someone jostled into him. “Oops, sorry, I tripped over a sprig of holly.”

It was his Aunt Raylene giving him an odd look. Had she overheard him ask Sarah to move in with him? Hell, was that what he’d just done?

Travis had a sudden thought. “Could you keep an eye on Jazzy for a few minutes, Aunt Ray?” he asked.

Raylene shifted her gaze to Sarah. “Sure, go on.”

“Thanks.” He took Sarah by the hand and tugged her away from the Christmas tree throng.

“Hey,” she said, holding up a fistful of tinsel, “I wasn’t finished.”

“Here.” He took the tinsel from her and thrust it at Moe, who was strolling by. “Hang some tinsel, Mayor.” He pulled Sarah toward Rinky-Tink’s. “Let’s go get some hot chocolate.”